The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine

Mount Sinai’s strategic plan provides a road map for major investments in research and infrastructure to establish a series of new Institutes, including The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine (IPM).

The Institute is dedicated to advancing personalized health and health care with three core objectives:

Provide clinical and translational investigators with greater and easier access to high quality, standardized biospecimen collections, linked with full clinical information.

Provide an academic research home and technology support for discovering clinically important genotype-phenotype associations through interdisciplinary, translational genomics programs.

Facilitate clinical development of gene-based diagnostics and risk assessment algorithms and evaluate their impact on health care delivery at the patient and population level.

IPM is home to research faculty pursuing studies in the clinical areas of pharmacogenomics, obesity and metabolic traits, cardiovascular and kidney disease. Institute faculty generates innovations and new paradigms in mapping of complex traits in diverse populations, clinical knowledge representation and phenomics, and personalized medicine clinical decision support.

Headed by Dr. Judy Cho, IPM provides full and sole support for the IPM BioMe Biobank Program including the Biobank Informatics and Genomic Data Analysis Services Center (BIGDASC).

BioMe™ Biobank Program

To discover better treatments, researchers are seeking to unravel the complexity of disease at the most basic level through “molecular” studies. The donation of samples from many thousands of individuals is essential to such studies. BioMe is a biobank program of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at Mount Sinai. BioMe is dedicated to advancing the application of human blood-derived biospecimen and clinical data to life science research to accelerate the development of personalized healthcare and medical solutions.

Since September 2007, over 33,000 Mount Sinai Health System patients have enrolled in the Electronic Medical Record-linked BioMe Biobank Program. It is designed to generate a large collection of DNA and plasma samples, and phenotypic (questionnaire-based and EMR-linked) and genomic data, that are stored in a way that protects patient’s privacy. The three major self-reported racial/ethnic populations include 32% EA (European Ancestry), 24% AA (African Ancestry, 35% HA (Hispanic Ancestry). At the same time, it enables research to be performed on de-identified, comprehensive, electronic clinical information extracted from the Mount Sinai Data Warehouse (MSDW).

IPM represents Mount Sinai as a member site to several large NIH-funded research networks, including the IGNITE Implementing GeNomics In pracTicE Network, Population Architecture Using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE), Phase II, eMERGE II Network (electronic medical records and genomics), the eMERGE-Pharmacogenetics Research Network (PGRN) research partnership, the CKD Biomarker Consortium, among others.

The BioMe Biobank Program contributes under collaborative agreements with international research consortia and collaborations, including: